The Gambia

Introduction

Last dry season, when my cousin’s son was named in our compound in Brikama, a jali came with his kora and sang the baby’s name back through his grandfathers until the old women were satisfied. Nobody wrote anything down. On the same afternoon my uncle sat on a bench by the kitchen with an exercise book and wrote how much each family had given towards the ceremony, so that every gift could be returned when that family’s turn came. I did not think of these two things as connected until I read Songs of Dust and Water by M.J. Hydara.

The novel is in two parts. Part One, “The Glass House of Sahel”, tells how a foreign solar and water plant in the village of Madina is seized by a minister and burns. Part Two, “The Water-Keeper”, is set ten years later in Nafawol, a village on a dry floodplain, where the people build a water harvester, a road, a mill and a common fund, and finally refuse a large offer from a foreign company. Through both parts, people keep memory. Some keep it in the voice: Balla, the Minister’s griot; the kora player with his four songs; the griot from Talawol who sings the ten years at the end. Others keep it on paper: Aisha’s exercise book, Fatou’s ledger, Talib’s notebook.

In this essay I shall argue that the novel does not choose between the griot and the ledger. It shows each one failing when it stands alone. The griot belongs to a patron and can only watch. The written record can be hidden in an office. Memory becomes trustworthy in the novel only when the record is kept in public, where anyone can read it, and when the song names the people who would otherwise be left out.

The griot in the corner

Balla is introduced as a man nobody notices. In the conference room in Bakoro he sits “in a shadowed corner” (p. 7) on a low stool, and the narrator says a visitor might have mistaken him for a servant before correcting this: “This was Balla, the Minister’s griot, the keeper of histories” (p. 7). He speaks only once in the meeting, and what he says is a proverb about Adam’s plan: a system with no roots “is a house built for the wind” (p. 7). The real work he does in the scene is silent. After everyone has gone, the narrator tells us, “He was remembering all of it, exactly as it had been spoken” (p. 9).

This is what a jali does in our own tradition. Thomas Hale, in Griots and Griottes (1998), describes the griot as many things at once, among them genealogist, adviser, spokesperson and witness to events. Balla is a witness in this sense. Yet the novel is careful to show where he sits. In the list of characters Khresay is called “Balla’s patron” (p. 234), and Balla’s memory serves the Minister’s house. When Khresay sends the letter back to Minister Dunia, it is the griot who carries it: “Balla rose from his stool and took it, and went out with it himself” (p. 70). When Khresay needs the date, he asks Balla, and Balla tells him. The keeper of histories is also the keeper of the office calendar and the office post. He remembers everything, and he cannot change anything.

Balla’s longest speech comes in Khresay’s house, after the fire, when Adam arrives with his evidence. The griot speaks “in the flat voice he kept for things already settled in the record” (p. 66). I noticed the word “record” here, because it is a ledger word, and Hydara gives it to the oral historian. Balla says that the histories blame drought for the fall of Wagadu and the grandmothers blame a broken promise: “Both are the same sentence, told by different people” (p. 66). Then he gives the grandmothers’ version, that Wagadu was lost four times, “four times lost, and four times found again” (p. 66), and he ends: “Only that it was always found by the people who had lost it” (p. 67).

This speech is wise, and it is also helpless. Adam goes out “without a word” (p. 67), and in Madina nothing is found again for many years. The griot can tell the shape of history, but he cannot tell the inquiry what really happened to the plant, because the inquiry does not listen to him and he does not speak to it. That is the first failure the novel shows: the voice that remembers everything has no power over the people who write the official story.

The four songs

The kora player who comes to Madina is a smaller figure than Balla, but in some ways he matters more. At the naming ceremony in Chapter 2, “the millet bought four songs” (p. 11). Hydara does not hide the payment. The griot “sang the child’s name back through his fathers” (p. 11), as our jalis do, and he was paid in millet to do it. Later, at Demba and Fanta’s wedding in Nafawol, the griot sings both families back seven generations, “with notes pressed into his hand at every name” (p. 179). Anyone who has been to a wedding in The Gambia will recognise that. The novel even shows the griot as a pressure on Mustapha, the corrupt signatory: the griot who carried the kola between the families keeps reminding him “what the groom’s people would expect to see” (p. 37). So the song costs money, and the singer’s kindly reminders are one of the pressures on a man deciding whether to take an envelope.

Still, the songs carry something that money does not explain. At the naming ceremony Ibrahim, the weaver who has stopped singing since his wife died, hums once, “when the kora came round to the second of its four songs, he had hummed” (p. 11). On the night the lights first come on, the kora player plays the four songs twice, and “a woman who had not danced since her husband died danced to the third” (p. 22). In both cases the song reaches people who have been shut in by grief. After the plant has burned and Talib has re-tied the broken warp thread, Ibrahim hums again, and the narrator names the tune exactly: “It was the second of the four songs the kora player had played at the naming ceremony” (p. 76).

By Chapter 27, more than twenty years later, the humming has become singing. “He sang it most mornings” (p. 216), and Hydara adds a detail that I think is the key to the whole theme: “If he lost a line he went back to the start of the verse rather than leave it out” (p. 216). Ibrahim treats the song the way Fatou will treat her ledger. Nothing may be dropped. Talib, meanwhile, “did not sing. He had the words by now, the way he had the warp count” (p. 216). One evening the old man loses a line and stops, and “Talib said the line, without looking up from the radio” (p. 219). Then: “His father took it and went on” (p. 219).

This small scene shows how oral memory survives. It survives when a second person carries it, even a son who says he does not sing. The kora player is never named, and after the night the lights come on he does not appear again. His song outlives him in a weaver’s house, passed from the father’s mouth to the son’s.

The written page: Aisha’s exercise book

If the griot is the old keeper of memory, the exercise book is the new one. What I find interesting is that the order to write comes from Khresay, the man who keeps a griot. When Aisha phones him in despair, he says: “Write everything down… Every warning. Every part. Every date. Keep a copy somewhere they cannot reach” (p. 44). A minister who has a keeper of histories sitting in his corner still tells his engineer to use paper. I think this is because he knows that Balla’s memory belongs to him, and that a ministry can be taken from him, as Madina was. Only a copy “they cannot reach” will survive the people in power.

Aisha’s book is more than a list of dates. On a page of its own she writes that refusing Malik’s bracket had been sound engineering, “and that leaving it in the dust without learning the smith’s name had not” (p. 44). That is the griot’s concern, the name, entering the engineer’s notebook. She also records her own temptation. When Minister Dunia offers her the north, she writes: “Offered the north. Did not answer” (p. 62). An honest record includes its keeper’s weakness.

The exercise book comes back at the very end. The woman from Madina leaves it in the Nafawol academy library, having kept it “for nearly twenty-five years, because a minister in Bakoro told her to write everything down” (p. 231). Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper, does not ask to hold it. She does what any grandmother in my compound would do and asks for it aloud: “Read me the first page” (p. 231). Hassan reads it aloud from his phone. So the written record ends by being turned back into speech. This, I think, is Hydara’s point. The page keeps the memory safe, and the voice gives it back to the people.

The ledger on the wall

Fatou’s ledger is the most important record in Part Two, and it differs from the portal in Madina in one way that matters: everyone can see it. In Madina the plant’s money vanished through a portal whose back rooms Talib had to search at night, with his apprentice login, while Adam slept. In Nafawol the ledger is posted in the square every Friday after prayers. Isatou puts the principle in a proverb of her own: “A pot everyone can see into does not empty in the night” (p. 132).

It is Isatou who first insists that the ledger must remember people as well as money. When the Road of Hands is being built, she comes to the committee with a list of the millet, oil and hours the women of the kafo have given, reading each number “under her breath in Mandinka before she said it in Nabari” (p. 113). Then she says: “Write it in your ledger” (p. 113). Her reason is a complaint about how memory usually works. When the road is finished, the men will tell their grandsons that they built it, and Isatou wants it written down who fed them, “so that the grandsons can read it for themselves” (p. 113).

When I read this I thought of the Sunjata epic as our jalis sing it. In the Gambian versions by Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute, translated by Gordon Innes and published by Penguin in 1999 with Lucy Durán’s introduction and notes, Sunjata overcomes the Susu king, but he needs the help of his sister to do it. Yet the epic carries his name, and most people who know the story remember the hero and forget her. Isatou is fighting that habit. She does not trust the song to remember the women, so she puts them in the ledger first.

The ledger also has to remember wrongdoing, including the keeper’s own. When the bank inspector finds a payment entered twice, Fatou writes the correction under the month’s last entry. “She did not cross either of them out” (p. 138). She explains the mistake, and “At the end of it she wrote her name in full, not the initials that stood at the foot of every page” (p. 139). “The line ran longer than any other on the page” (p. 139). It is praise-naming turned round: she names herself by her error. Mamadou does the same when his grandson Lamin is caught stealing from the Fund. He asks the committee to write “His name, and the sum, and what it bought” (p. 169), and then adds, “Then write mine under it, as the one who asked for the rule” (p. 169).

The ledger can also wait for the truth. Beside the line for rebuilding the broken culvert, Fatou leaves an empty space, and when the inspector asks about it she says: “A name… When we have it” (p. 139). The name arrives years later, when Alkalo Musa of Sirawol confesses that men from his village were paid to break the culvert. Mamadou asks for it to be written “In your record and in ours” (p. 155), and the man who paid is never charged, but “every trader on the floodplain could read the two records” (p. 155). In a society where everyone knows everyone, as in The Gambia, a public record works almost like a court. The ledger even keeps a son who is far away. When Kadiatou’s son sends money from the docks, she tells Fatou: “Write that it came from the docks” (p. 167), and the wall shows “From the docks” (p. 167) beside the academy’s second building.

The griot from Talawol: song and ledger together

The two kinds of memory meet in Chapter 26, at the feast for Adam’s departure. A griot from Talawol sings the ten years, “and left out nobody who had carried a stone” (p. 214). That phrase could describe the ledger. Then the narrator says: “He named each by a deed: Kadiatou by the rope, Isatou by her list, Edrisa by the first stone of the road” (p. 214). Isatou, who did not trust the song, is named in it, and she is named by her written list. The record she forced on the committee has entered the oral tradition. I think this is the most satisfying moment in the book for the theme of memory, though it takes only one sentence.

The Talawol griot also does something with history that Balla could not. He sets the story beside Kaabu and Jolof, “so that Wagadu would not have to carry it alone” (p. 214). In the academy, the griot from Talawol who teaches the histories begins with Wagadu and then goes on to Kaabu, Jolof, the Fula, the Jola and the Serer, “so that no child went home without hearing their own” (p. 151). As a Mandinka girl from the West Coast, I was glad to see Kaabu here. Kaabu was the Mandinka kingdom whose lands covered much of what is now Guinea-Bissau and the Casamance and reached into The Gambia, and its rulers came from the Nyancho lineages. Its capital, Kansala, fell in 1867, when the last mansaba, Janke Waali, set fire to his own gunpowder stores rather than surrender the town. Our jalis still play “Kelefa Ba”, about the Nyancho warrior Kelefa Saane, and Gordon Innes collected Gambian griots’ accounts of Kaabu in Kaabu and Fuladu (1976). The novel’s glossary says that Mandinka griots “still sing its fall” (p. 238).

I would have liked more Kaabu in the book. Wagadu, the Sarahule empire, carries the main story of the novel, from Balla’s speech to the coda, and Kaabu appears only beside it. I also noticed that Sunjata himself is never named, although he would be the first hero a Gambian griot sang. Perhaps Wagadu carries the story because its story is about a promise and about water, and those are what both villages in the novel are short of. Readers in the Brikama area may also notice that there is no kankurang at any of the ceremonies. I do not count these as faults. The novel is about a well and a common fund, and it uses the history that fits that subject. But the griots in Nafawol know that every child must hear their own people’s story, and I think a Gambian reader will want the same.

The notebook and the coda

Talib, whose name, he tells Adam, “means student” (p. 30), holds the two traditions together in his own life. He keeps a notebook of machines, and after the vote in Nafawol, “he wrote the name of the union, and under it the name of the village” (p. 202) on its cracked cover. He is also the son who holds the line of his father’s song. At the end he travels to Nafawol with the notebook under his arm, and Aisha leaves her exercise book in its library. Both of Madina’s written records travel south to the place whose story the griot sang, and one of them stays there.

The coda is only four sentences long. It repeats the two versions of Wagadu’s fall, the drought and the broken promise, and ends: “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” (p. 233). I read this as a warning about memory too. A single keeper, whether Balla in his corner or Mustapha with his pen or Adam with his power of attorney, can always be bought, frightened or silenced. Nafawol’s answer is to spread the keeping over many hands: three signatures, a wall in the square, a griot who names the women, a son who knows his father’s song.

Conclusion

Songs of Dust and Water shows the griot and the ledger as two halves of one task. Balla remembers everything exactly, but he belongs to a patron and can change nothing. Aisha’s book and Fatou’s ledger keep what power would like to forget, but a record kept in an office, like the portal in Madina, can be used to hide theft. The novel’s answer is a record that hangs on a wall in the square, admits its keeper’s mistakes and waits years for a name, and a song that learns from that record and names “Isatou by her list”. When I went back to my uncle’s exercise book after reading the novel, I saw that it does the same work as the jali’s song. One remembers who gave, the other remembers who we are, and in a good compound both are kept where everyone can see and hear them.

1. Introduction and aim

Nafawol, in M.J. Hydara’s novel Songs of Dust and Water, is a fictional village on a floodplain “the river had long since abandoned” (p. 81), in a fictional country called Tekuru. Its well has gone salty, its young men have gone to the coast and its fields have turned to white crust. Over fifteen years, with money from a foreign fund called Proxima, it builds a water harvester, a road, a mill and a common fund, and forms a union with other villages. Many things about Nafawol will be familiar to anyone from the North Bank: the alkalo and the seyfo, the lumo, the women’s kafo, the osusu pot, and sons who send money “when there was money” (p. 86).

The aim of this project is to ask what a real Gambian village, such as the villages around Farafenni, could learn from Nafawol, and also what it cannot copy. I look at four problems that are set by the task: salt in the land and water, women’s gardens and the kafo, osusu and savings, and young people leaving.

2. Method

I read the whole novel twice and made notes on every scene that dealt with these four problems, with page numbers. I then compared what I found with what I know of my own area. I spoke to my grandmother, who has farmed rice by the river for most of her life, and to my aunt, who is the treasurer of her kafo’s garden. I also read a newspaper report on saltwater intrusion and some general reading on rice farming in The Gambia, listed at the end. I have tried not to use figures I cannot check.

3. Background: my own area

Farafenni lies on the North Bank, close to the border with Senegal and near the Senegambia Bridge, which opened in 2019. Our lumo brings traders from both sides of the border. Many families here farm groundnuts on the upland and rice on the low ground near the river and the bolongs, and rice farming on the swamps has long been women’s work. The historian Judith Carney, in Black Rice (2001), writes about the long history of rice growing by women in The Gambia and the knowledge that went with it.

The River Gambia is tidal for a long way inland, and in the dry season salt water moves further up the river. In recent years, with less rain and rising seas, it has reached rice fields that used to be fresh. In 2025 the journalist Kebba Jeffang reported for Dialogue Earth on rice farmers in the North Bank and further upriver who have lost much of their harvest to salt. He reported that an assessment carried out for the National Environment Agency had found that the area planted with rice fell by 42 per cent between 2009 and 2023, that a salt-tolerant rice variety has been introduced, and that many of the dykes built by earlier projects are now broken. He also described women turning from rice to vegetable gardens watered from shallow wells. My grandmother says the same thing in fewer words: “The river has become sea.”

At the same time, many young men from our area, and some young women, have left by “the back way”, the dangerous road through the desert and Libya and across the Mediterranean to Europe. Some have died. Some have come home, many of them helped by the International Organization for Migration after being held in Libya. My own cousin was one of those who came back. He now works as a welder in Farafenni, and he does not like to talk about the journey. I mention him because the question of leaving is not abstract in our compound.

4. Findings from the novel

5. What a Gambian village cannot copy

It would be dishonest to say a Gambian village could simply do what Nafawol did. Nafawol had a hundred million dollars from Proxima spread over the region, an engineer born in the village who had measured its water for eleven years, and a borehole into deep water. Most villages around Farafenni have none of these. The harvester, the solar panels and the mill came from outside money.

The novel itself seems to know this. Its most useful lessons are the cheap ones: stone lines, records on the wall, three signatures, kafo fees, listening to the old women about where the salt goes. Its warnings are also cheap to learn. A sealed boiler in Sirawol shows how one government inspector can stop a village’s work for ten months. A clerk who keeps the same book too long can steal in small amounts. And a large offer of money can divide a village, as the TransGlobal offer does. Isatou’s question about the fifty thousand dollars for each family, “Into whose hand?” (p. 190), is one that every Gambian woman would ask about any payment made to the head of a household.

6. Recommendations

From this study I would recommend the following for a village in my area:

1. The village development committee should keep its accounts on a public board at the bantaba, updated after every market week, and require three signatures from different households for large payments.
2. Women rice farmers should be asked, and their answers written down, about which fields turn salty first and when. This knowledge should go to the extension officers and to any dyke project.
3. Any dyke or barrier built by a project should have a village maintenance plan, with kafo labour each dry season, agreed with the herders, so that it does not fall apart when the project ends.
4. Women’s garden kafos should have a seat, or at least a voice, wherever water for the village is decided, and their labour for public works should be recorded and paid.
5. The osusu should be respected, and any village fund should work alongside it without trying to absorb it.
6. Young people who leave, and those who return, should be treated as members of the village with their contributions recorded, like “From the docks” on Nafawol’s wall, and young people should have their own vote in village decisions, as Nafawol gives them in the Union Council.

7. Conclusion

What a Gambian village can learn from Nafawol is mostly practical and mostly slow. Salt has to be managed with the knowledge of the women who farm the land, through works that the village maintains for itself. Women’s kafos and their osusu are already strong institutions and should be given a voice. A common fund only stays honest if its accounts are public. Above all, the novel teaches that every choice has a cost, and that the cost should be written down where everyone can see who paid it: the Teranu who left, Mariam’s lost year, Edrisa’s six months on the coast. Nafawol does not solve the problem of young people leaving, but it makes staying possible for some of them, and it keeps the names of those who go. My cousin came home with nothing to show for his journey but what he learned. I would like our village to write his name on its wall too.